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8: Wearing the sales hat + tick-tocking between products

Episode Summary

Kyle and Landon discuss Ad Reform growth, sales, tick-tock development, and more.

Episode Notes

Kyle and Landon discuss Ad Reform growth, sales, tick-tock development, and more.

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Episode Transcription

8: Wearing the sales hat + tick-tocking between products

Kyle: [00:00:00] But those are the moments where we're like, Oh, this is about to be, it went from like everybody in the house is sleeping except for me to like the entire house is about to be awake, so can turn on a dime.

 what's up. We're back.

Landon: [00:00:20] What's going

Kyle: [00:00:21] Yeah. So another week missed. Sadly, I'll take the heat. I'm still figuring out how to be a father of two and do things, do work.

Landon: [00:00:30] Sounds really hard.

Kyle: [00:00:32] but yeah, a lot of it's just, it's harder to carve out, like time for us to both be on here at the same time. So a lot of my work has been happening and weird hours that would not make sense to be recording. So,

Landon: [00:00:42] don't you talk about your shifts.

Kyle: [00:00:44] yeah. So. My wife and I love with our first kid, we did alternating, so like nine, 12, three and six, and we would just switch off who would feed the baby.

but this time we're trying something a little different cause part of it was like our second, like our new baby Sloan is not sleeping like as reliably yet. She's still kind of not quite to that point. So we wanted to like guarantee some sleep. So we started doing like shifts. Half and half instead of like alternating.

So I was just all stay up with her until like two, two 30 and then I'll go to bed for like four or five hours. So it works out pretty well cause you know you're going to get like four or five hours completely alone. But obviously it's not a lot of hours. And in between you can like try to like nap and like snooze while she's, while she's sleeping.

But I've been trying to work a little bit cause it's like, Oh the world is quiet and I can do a few things and try to catch up a little bit. So. But that wouldn't make any sense to record a podcast during that hour. So anyway, that's what we're

Landon: [00:01:46] be there for that one.

Kyle: [00:01:47] Hopefully. Yeah. Hopefully she'll, she's, you know, she's growing, getting a little older.

Hopefully she'll start to stretch that out.

Landon: [00:01:56] Yeah.

Kyle: [00:01:56] We shall see.

Landon: [00:01:58] It's crazy. I don't know how, I don't know how you guys are doing that.

Kyle: [00:02:03] Well, last night too, it was. Uh, it was like one around one and I was like, I had worked for a little bit, Sloane had been asleep and probably was gonna sleep for about another hour.

So it was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lay my head down and right when I sit on the couch, Emma, my oldest, like Sturtz, gets up, stands up in her crib and just start screaming. And it was like one in the morning. I'm just like, Oh, what is happening? But luckily I gave her like a little bit, I gave her a few minutes and she ended up going back to sleep.

But those are the moments where we're like, Oh, this is about to be, it went from like everybody in the house is sleeping except for me to like the entire house is about to be awake, so can turn on a dime.

Landon: [00:02:42] Yeah. We, uh, my, this is Landon myEd. My daughter woke up at like five this morning and started like making kind of screaming and like making noises, and I was like, Oh, we're going to, it's going to be like an early morning.

We're going to get up and do it. So we just, we always wait for like 20 minutes just to kind of. You know, see what, see what might happen. And, uh, it took her like an hour and a half and then she like, went back to sleep, but we, at the end, we were awake the entire time. So

Kyle: [00:03:09] becomes, for me, it's like it becomes about them.

Like I'm just like, I want you to sleep cause otherwise you're going to be miserable. Like I don't care if I sleep as much like I can. I have, you know, a sense of awareness. I can overcome that. But. I don't want to be like, I'm exhausted and you're exhausted because you didn't sleep like it's going to be that.

That's, that's never a good recipe,

Landon: [00:03:28] Well. We also had the, my daughter's room is over the guest room and me and you and our wives went out last night for drinks to celebrate a big milestone. And I had the, the nanny state our house to babysit, and then she slept over. So she was sleeping in the guest room downstairs above like right under the baby.

She's screaming at 5:00 AM and up and our wall, like floors and walls and all that stuff are not very thick. So I was like, Oh gosh, can I keep her up? And then like, she's going to be miserable

Kyle: [00:04:03] to be miserable.

Landon: [00:04:05] So,

Kyle: [00:04:06] Yeah. The drinks too.

Landon: [00:04:07] get thrown.

Kyle: [00:04:08] It's funny having those things cause you're like, it's such a Trey.

I mean it's always kind of that way, but especially right now with like the newborn sleep cycle or lack thereof, it's like we went out for drinks and like in our shift model, that was like, that's when my wife would be sleeping from like nine til, you know too. So like couple of those hours disappeared.

It's like, what do we do now? But we worked it out.

Landon: [00:04:31] So yeah, we hit a big milestone that was

Kyle: [00:04:33] Yeah, we kind of subverted that there. We buried the lead.

Landon: [00:04:35] threw it out there. Yeah, I hit a big, another big revenue milestone. Um, so we're, uh, mostly due to, I dunno, mostly due to ad reform, which is, had a, a big , push lately.

We've talked about it on the podcast before, but we started some, some advertising and started experimenting with advertising. Not that much money, but we've started to increase that a good bit as we've had success. And it's been going really well. And we had our, we had our best, best month.

October was our best month in terms of revenue, like trial sign ups, um, like leads to con to, to trial conversion, um, track, I think, traffic as well. So we've, uh. Hopefully we can continue to repeat this model even at that level. It doesn't have to like grow from that, like even if it just

Kyle: [00:05:32] even half of that level would be good.

Just kind of a steady state. I don't know what that'll look like, or if there isn't one, there might not be one, but. But you know, if we make the time window like a quarter or six months, if we can keep like a nice steady growth pattern. So yeah. You have some metrics over there from like I need, yeah, we talked about some, some of the metrics I think before, but we pulled some graphs from like analytics and lead Intercom user and lead signups.

Landon: [00:06:01] Yeah, it looks like we had, like in 2019 we averaged about, um, it looks like we averaged about like 20 new users, 20, 25 new users added to the platform. So like that's going to be like trials or new users, like in other accounts. Um, usually it's mostly coming from new trials cause like once people sign up, they just add all their users or whatever.

But, um, and also about, about the same, like 20, 25, uh, leads. So people like reaching out, asking to potentially use the platform or signing up on our site. Um, and that increased in September and October when we started advertising. Um, our new users increased to like. I guess around like 50 to 60.

And then our, um, our new leads inc looks like an increased to like a hundred, so, uh, per month. So that's like, that's quite a

Kyle: [00:07:07] massive jump. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense cause like a massive jump in leads due to just advertising exposure and then a less drastic but still large jump and users as those leads convert into trials,

Landon: [00:07:19] it looks, yeah, it looked like our, um, are page views was around a 25,000 for the month of October and a of the like, of those we had like, um.

1800 new users, so unique, like never been to the site before. So, um, a lot more people coming to the site, a lot more signups, and obviously that's generated a lot more, uh, pretty big, um, pretty big growth in terms of, uh, opportunities in pipeline. So that's another thing. Like, we've closed a lot in October, but our pipeline also is like much bigger.

So now I've started to have to like, Oh, I kind of like

Kyle: [00:08:05] Actually track this

Landon: [00:08:05] mode again. Yeah. So my background is in sales and obviously tracking all that stuff and like Salesforce, and we're not going to go, I'm not going that far. It's just me. But, um, I just, I like created my own little basic CRM inside of notion and I'm tracking, well not a CRM, but more like a pipeline management tool.

So I'm just tracking it in there and trying to, um, keep track of everything and follow ups and all that kind of stuff. And some of these deals are actually pretty large. We've got some that are. You know, anywhere from like 30 to like $80,000, um, annually. So we're starting to get into some like real, like enterprise style sales again, which is what a lot of what I did in the past.

And it's been interesting starting to deal with like the stuff you deal with in enterprise. It's not true. Enterprise sales, the deal size are just bigger. So it's the stuff you deal with, with

Kyle: [00:09:04] You have the approval flows

Landon: [00:09:06] approvals. And then you the real, the real one is like when procurement comes to town, so it's like, Oh yeah, we've got this other guy we're going to, we're going to bring on the,

Kyle: [00:09:16] This guy who doesn't care anything about.

The tool or anything about this? He's just here to throw.

Landon: [00:09:22] throw a wrench, lower hit. I mean, literally like procurement's job is to trim fat off the D, like just to get the deal lower like that. Is there one metric internally? So. They know all the right questions to ask all the, you know, I've seen it a million different times.

That's happened to me in the past. And we used to like, so Kyle, Kyle and I used to work at another company. Um, and we sold primary, like big brands, like big eCommerce brands, um, big ticketing, like online ticketing, site brands, online publisher brands. So like, I just remember so many different occasions where, um.

Like procurement gets brought in and they always asked the same questions. They always say the same things, which is like, Hey, we're talking to, we're talking to all your competitors. Um, and you know, they're 50% cheaper. It's like, it's always, we're talking to these people and you're, they're way cheaper.

Like, you guys are not really in the race anymore, but it's like,

Kyle: [00:10:19] I, I took the time to email you five times to tell you that you're not in the race

Landon: [00:10:22] exactly. Like, um, that's actually something, if you are in deals with procurement and they start. Mentioning competitors, it usually means that like mentioning competitors in terms of like being cheaper than you, it usually means you already won the deal and you just don't know it yet.

Like they want to use you. That's why they're telling you that. Otherwise they would have already gone to those other competitors and use their product because why would, if it was 50%

Kyle: [00:10:46] go take the money and

Landon: [00:10:47] and it would, yeah, if they liked the product the same and it's 50% you know, cheaper, why would they not use that product?

They're telling you that because they want to use your product and they want you to lower the price. So. Getting back into that swing of things and just remembering how to deal with those situations and, um, how to respond to things like language and response responses and how many responses and exactly what you say.

Like though, all those things are so important in these little weird like cat and mouse games with procurement and negotiations and everything. So, and a lot of it is done over email, not like in person or. Like even over the phone or whatever. So the, that kind of stuff matters a lot, so I'm just like getting back into it.

Trying to remember how

Kyle: [00:11:35] like the, yeah, that muscle atrophied a little bit.

Landon: [00:11:39] I don't even, I don't even know how to sell anymore. I don't remember what it was like for all, all those, all those people, if anybody's listening that used to work for me on the sales side. Sorry, I don't know what I'm doing anymore.

Kyle: [00:11:49] It's a little different. There's a, there's a few more things to think about these days, I guess, but, which I guess kind of relates to, um, like we're getting more an influx from this advertising effort and spending more time on the sales side of ad reform. We're also trying to spend more time on the engineering side there.

Um, so we've, we have another developer on the team, so we have a little more Reese, you know, a little more bandwidth and. Trying to like find a way to spend, spend time on both products. And I don't know, we'll see how that goes. But the ticktock development thing is like, we're trying to, to talk or, or tick whichever one we weren't doing.

We're going to do, um, and, but try to keep both, keep a good pulse on both. And.

Landon: [00:12:37] It's getting hot, like it's definitely getting, I would say it's getting harder to, focus, like on, like I feel like before we, we kind of went one way or the other, like it was like, we're going hard over here and then over here just sort of exist and it just like.

Runs and, um, on its own. And as we've added more, more and more customers, um, especially on the ad reform side, well, I mean, especially on both, like we have, we have a lot more customers on the user feed side, but they're much lower paying customers. So our revenue is not as high. Um, on the ed reform side, we have less customers, but.

Kyle: [00:13:20] a lot

Landon: [00:13:21] they pay a lot more. And I would say they even potentially use it a lot more cause like they have to use it like multiple times a day for different things. Um, user feed can sort of be something where you just wait there and then stuff just comes in so that you don't get in the platform all the time.

But it's, as we've started to, um, get more customers and specifically started to, um. Get a lot more leads, as we just mentioned before, that requires a lot more attention on the sales and support side while you're taking people through, through like either demos or like trials and all that stuff, and contract negotiations.

And like, that's a lot of my time and your time. Cause we usually, if there's some sort of negotiation, we both have to make a decision on what we're gonna do. But, um, so that's just, it's, it's become hard just dealing with one. And now like having two things going on, it's like, Oh God, it's hard to focus and it's not necessarily hard to run both because, um, you know, like, especially like they both sort of run on their own user feed maybe a little bit more.

So, um, so it can just, it can just be there and exist. Even if you're not like a whole day. If you spent the whole day work on ad reform and didn't do anything on, use it for you, it would be totally fine. It would just exist. But if you're not doing anything on it. Right? Like you're not, you're all your time and focuses on one thing.

So it is getting harder to deal with that. So we're trying to

Kyle: [00:14:48] Yeah. I think too, it's, but it does seem like maybe not like a, Oh, it's getting harder and it's just going to continue to get harder and harder. It feels like one of those things. Where it's like there's moments where you're at some some capacity or you're at some, like it gets harder until you break through to that next like level.

So like if, so ad reform is growing but we aren't. Yeah, exactly. Like we're growing ed reform, so there's a big strain on like the, the sales side and a bit on the support side, but we're not quite to the growth that we can afford to ease those pains with hiring. So once we get to that point, then they're like, it'll free back up a bit.

Landon: [00:15:26] this is why, this is kind of why some people will take funding, whether that's through giving up equity or that's through debt or whatever. So they can kind of like get ahead of that and like grow with it.

Kyle: [00:15:39] smooth out those, those

Landon: [00:15:41] the hard part of

Kyle: [00:15:42] and flows. Yeah.

Landon: [00:15:43] Like we don't have the cash like we're making.

We're very profitable and we're making pretty good money now. Um, especially since it's just, uh, just two of us in Atlanta and, um, like we, but it, we still don't have tons of cash on hand.

Kyle: [00:16:00] Well, and we're pretty conservative about it. Like we could, we could hire more reps. I mean, we've talked about that before.

We could hire a little more aggressively and like, you know, shorten the time horizon, but yeah. Anyway, so I think it's. It's all part of it. I think. Um, hopefully we can keep growing on the ed reform side and on the user feed side. And then just add, add people where we need people and or you know, or add.

The other thing is like adding automation or identifying areas where we can improve to avoid like support conversations or to help like address whatever those underlying drivers are. So.

Landon: [00:16:37] also fun, like we haven't spent as much time as I would prefer on the ad reform, like product side. So getting back into that again and like.

Doing some stuff we'd know we've won like we needed to do. And we, we use user feed for ad reform. So seeing like, okay, this is obviously like, you know, we've had in the last like three months, we've had 10 people request this, this feature. We're like, it's so nice to like, spend some time and get that stuff done and um, just give it a little bit more, more love

Kyle: [00:17:12] Yeah.

No, it's going to be, it's going to be good. And I think it's, it's fun. I mean, we've said this before too, but it's fun having two products that are, not only are the markets and the solutions and everything so different, but the like one is tightly integrated with Intercom and there's all these like moving parts.

And then ad reform is like fully controlled by us and kind of has like a narrow. Focus and I just, it's fun switching back and forth. Like I think it, it can re-energize. Like right now I'm feeling a little worn down and I'm going to, I know I'm going to get re re-energize, kind of doing some stuff on it in a different context.

I think it like that. Even if it's not even like that one context is better than the other. It's just like switching on occasion. Just can re re-energize.

Landon: [00:17:53] I mean. That was one of the reasons we started user feed in the first place. Was that of like

Kyle: [00:17:59] in the reverse. Yeah. In the reverse direction and so now we're back in and doing it in the other

Landon: [00:18:04] Yeah, we were, I just remember at that point we were like, if you do any, like that's, I get the, I get the whole like work on one thing from a focus standpoint, but.

If you don't have any other thing to like spend some time on or like do something new, like you just get stuck.

Kyle: [00:18:20] Even within, even within one product though, like it's not, it's not like you need to have like five different businesses to switch, but it's like, yeah, like tinker on a different project or, and this kind of also like in the shape up approach where they spend six weeks, one of the things they talk about is like, it not being so long that you get burned out.

Um, I think even at our size that might even be too long. Like that is maybe too long for us. That's part of it too. Like keeping your project short. Cause the longer they go on, the more there's like. This burden, you feel like you haven't shipped anything or this thing is just you're spinning your wheels and like even on that front, you can kind of address that by switching, like having, having, Oh, you had one big project.

Okay, I have a few shorter ones that you can like get out or do dabble in some completely different part of the business.

Landon: [00:19:07] Yeah, I mean, at, um, my wife's company Twillio they have like, they will fund little, like, ideas that they have specifically ideas that are like internal business problems.

So like, one of the things, um, they have a challenge with sometimes is like trying to explain ROI to people. So they, like, they have like a little team of like two or three people that, um. They gave them some funding and they're like, well, you know, they're paying them or whatever. And like, you go work on this project for

Kyle: [00:19:37] Like, here's a budget to go build a

Landon: [00:19:39] yeah.

So, well, they're not even like, at first, they're just like coming up with processes to like, have it almost like a consulting team that does like ROI analysis. And then they'll, like, they do it for certain bigger deals that they have. So stuff like, that's cool. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think, uh, just working on.

I mean, I know that in my last company, I, uh, especially on the sales side too, like you get, you get bogged down just doing, you just, you're in a hamster wheel and it never ends. Like you're just running to hit like numbers

Kyle: [00:20:17] And as soon as you hit

Landon: [00:20:18] the same things and then, yeah, you hit it and everybody's super excited and you get drinks and then literally the next day it's like, we're back at zero and you've got to do the same thing again, except for, it's going to be way harder.

Um, it just, it takes a toll on

Kyle: [00:20:33] think they're, yeah. I think there's two elements of that. Cause one like. One that I think we we benefit from is because we run the business like we want, we don't have that. You feel more free like so you don't have that burden of feeling like you're on this one track and you have to do this thing and bubbly.

I would say we, the other side of it is like taking time to celebrate and like slow down and be like, like have a little perspective. I think we probably should do a little bit better job of that, but because we're so small and like we don't have like a high stress environment, it doesn't. It doesn't hurt us quite as bad as it could, but we also, we don't really, I mean that's partly why we went and got drinks cause it was like we don't, we haven't been good about that.

Um, so I think it helps to do that as well.

Landon: [00:21:17] Especially when you have, if you have more employees. Then you kind of, you don't have to do it, but

Kyle: [00:21:24] Well, like people like don't, it's like, yeah, the, the bigger the company is, the more. You need to like over acknowledge and over do some of that stuff to make sure that everyone

Landon: [00:21:34] why care less about myself and my own feelings than I care about somebody else

Kyle: [00:21:38] and they, and they don't know your internal, like psychology, so they don't know if you're like stressed or you're feeling good or so.

Landon: [00:21:45] Exactly. Yeah. That's

Kyle: [00:21:47] I don't even know what we're, I don't even know where we are now. We're on, it's a therapy session now, but, um,

Landon: [00:21:51] That's what this is. It's therapy and yeah, you need it sometimes, but, um, but yeah, so I think, uh, I think the context switching will be really good. Um, so now we're like talking through like all these things of like, how do we, how do we switch?

One of the things that we're talking about doing, which maybe is an interesting little side topic here, is. All of our, so both outer form and user feed are built. You just built the websites, like

Kyle: [00:22:20] They just run on the same backend as our apps.

Landon: [00:22:23] Yeah. So, which was easy and simple at

Kyle: [00:22:26] basic.

Landon: [00:22:26] Yeah.

But now we're starting to get to the point where, you know, we did that because initially like it was like right when we launched the products and everything, but now we're getting the point where like, we have a lot new, a lot of new features. Um. We're constantly adding, adding more. And you want to, you know, we're very behind in terms of like what's showing up on the site because that takes time to add and only you can add it, cause I'm not technical, so I'm like, I'm not building that stuff.

So we're, you know, we have, you know, more testimonials. We could be adding different landing pages. We could be adding for the ads that were, so basically, long story short, we're like, okay, we need to, we should probably get, uh, something we can like host the site on where we can, um. Build pages and do things without necessarily you having to do it.

Like, I can do it too, and we can make changes on the fly easier. So we're looking at, um, moving to, you know, something like, everyone knows like Webflow but so something like Webflow even though I think we're probably not gonna do that,

Kyle: [00:23:28] yeah, maybe it seems. It seems like it would be a good choice, but there's a little bit of a curve.

There's more work, like for something that's so simple as our site, it's almost like we don't need all that power. So we'll see. Um,

Landon: [00:23:42] So we're looking at, what are we looking at, Landon?

Kyle: [00:23:45] Yeah. Landon

Landon: [00:23:46] called Landen.

Kyle: [00:23:47] I mean, there's a, there's a bunch of them, obviously,

Landon: [00:23:49] Swift. We'll give some some love to the local Atlanta company.

Kyle: [00:23:53] WordPress, if you want to go, we're not really looking at that, but if you want to go old, standby. So, yeah, I mean, it'd be nice to pull that out and like make it so we can keep, keep things up to date without a bunch of overhead. And like, I'm not, I'm not like a big web designer type person either.

So a lot of the results of these tools will be better than

Landon: [00:24:12] Well, you kind

Kyle: [00:24:13] my hand rolled, uh, websites.

Landon: [00:24:15] doing some, some cool little like illustrations and stuff and

Kyle: [00:24:19] I would, yeah. Very lightweight. I can do a little bit, but it's not my, it's not my strong suit or my favorite part. So,

Landon: [00:24:26] I've had people like ask me.

Like who we're using as a designer. So boom.

Kyle: [00:24:33] I, I think that says more about those people than it does about me,

Landon: [00:24:36] probably. I mean, you know, they're not like the greatest designs in the world. They're not like, they're not a designer type of design, but the like for a non designer, they're pretty awesome.

Kyle: [00:24:46] yeah, they do the job and like tools like fig make it pretty easy to do like some basic stuff, so, so yeah, it'll be, it'll be, it'll be nice to move. I also think it's funny, like in the early days. We, we were so frugal that we were like, part of it is like, shoot, we don't want to spend money on like a, we don't want a monthly subscription for like our website.

Like why would we need that? Especially when the website's like two pages and now you're like, okay, that's the least. Like I would gladly pay a small monthly fee for the ability to just move, update, like experiment. Cause that's the other thing is it's not even just keeping up to date with features, but we also want to experiment with like messaging, especially on the user feed side.

Like. Part of our challenge on the support is like people don't always know what they can do or what we do. And so making it easier to like play with the headlines and play with the different copy will be, will be a good thing, I think.

Landon: [00:25:38] think that's like, we always talk about experiments and then like, like short, small, cheap.

Like, look, uh, not spending a lot of time type experiments are essential to like everything we do like in every area of it. Whether it's price, I mean even like pricing, that's one where like the, you're playing around with the and site, I can't believe it's called Landon, but Landon, um, like the price, like mate pricing pages are super simple and you could like adjust that stuff on the fly.

And obviously, unfortunately with pricing there's a lot more that goes into it than just changing the pricing page. Cause. You know, you gotta like adjust Stripe and all that stuff, and that's actually a whole nother world of pain.

Kyle: [00:26:19] but that's something too, like. Giving ourselves the power to experiment with pricing like faster, just on pure marketing pipe pages would make me think differently about how we implement the backend, right?

Like we can implement it in a way that's more, maybe more manual or more whatever, but it lets us like, Hey, we're, we're gonna throw a pricing page up and see if like people start being more interested in converting because of the way we price it. And then we can handle the Stripe stuff. Like.

Some of it manually if we need to, to like address the new structure.

Landon: [00:26:55] I think putting like that's actually interesting cause if we're, if we're starting from scratch, I would say like in every, in every area of the business, like try to, uh, I guess initially build processes. Um, or put things in place to a point like where it allows you to experiment in that area.

Like whether it's Stripe and pricing or whether it's the web, the actual website itself. Like if we were starting tomorrow, I would say we probably should have used,

Kyle: [00:27:25] Oh, we would straight up go to one of

Landon: [00:27:27] with, I mean, it's easier to say

Kyle: [00:27:29] it is easier to say now. I mean, cause a big part of it is like when you start, you don't know if you're ever gonna make $1.

So the thought of spending, even if it's not that much money, you're like, what? I don't want to spend money. You and I have no clear line of sight to like making money.

Landon: [00:27:42] Yup.

Kyle: [00:27:43] Um, I think we, we, we could've done this a while ago, like once we made a little bit of money, like that could have been the first thing to do.

Just. Let's just kick out the, but then even then, you're like so focused on building for the first handful of customers that you're not going to spend time doing that. So yeah, it's hard to know in retrospect, but this feels like a good time to do it and yeah, I think.

Landon: [00:28:02] That's why it's kind of nice.

You know, I was listening, I guess it was the art of prod art of product. I think that was the podcast, or maybe it was maybe was a different one, but I think the folks from that podcast were on this other podcast. Um, and they were talking about how, like initially they didn't even have like a pricing page or anything.

Like they just sort of like every person they talk to or try to close a deal with, they would give like a different price

Kyle: [00:28:26] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, cause we're, I'm a to pool, we are to pull customers. Um, and even we just like IDM dim on Twitter or something and then he like, that's how it went. So yeah, I think they did a bunch of that.

I think that the tricky thing that I haven't quite figured out is like, how do you G how do you bring that together with like some sort of organization in Stripe and also connection to like feature access. I think those are like the. The components that I don't know how they fit together when you're trying to go like very experimental, but if you just completely like for something like Tupelo, I don't think they have tiers.

Maybe they do now.

Landon: [00:29:05] way, I guess the way you could do that as. Number one, you'd have to be just have the whole like cuss, just everything is a custom Stripe plan and that it's just more manual. Well, actually if you want to do this, everything's going to be more manual. So the custom Stripe plans, and then I guess you could like, uh, a lot of your features could be like feature flagged.

So then you could just turn stuff on for

Kyle: [00:29:28] Like if you're onboarding every account somewhat manually, then yeah, you could just do that, which honestly works for a lot of businesses, so. And woodwork for ours.

Landon: [00:29:37] Yeah. Yeah. So that's, yeah. So I guess designing your business processes to be like AB testable would be the way to kind of

Kyle: [00:29:47] kind of.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way to say it and

Landon: [00:29:49] definitely didn't start the business doing any of that stuff. So now I would say if we did, everything would be like, we need to have that lens on

Kyle: [00:29:56] Well, even even, we were just talking about kind of a new product, not a completely new product, but like kind of a new.

Project within the user feed family, I guess. But

Landon: [00:30:10] It's a new PR. It's a, it's a new

Kyle: [00:30:11] yeah, so we were talking about that and it's like, I'm all, I was already thinking if we decide we want to go that route, we might want to just start with some marketing material and stuff. Like we can kind of do that stuff first to start generating some interest as we build out the underlying, like we don't, we don't have to, even, even though we're in a position where we could actually build it.

And fund it ourselves. It's like we might as well treat it like we would if it were day one with no money and you know, throw, throw up a landing page.

Landon: [00:30:42] Well, it can be a landing page within our

Kyle: [00:30:44] within our website. Exactly. Yup.

Landon: [00:30:47] so yeah, we need to, we need to make that change. Um, I dunno what we're going to go with yet.

If anybody has any war

Kyle: [00:30:55] experience with these are recommendations or, yeah.

Landon: [00:31:00] I'm sure everybody uses a Webflow. That's like the hot

Kyle: [00:31:03] That's the, yeah, that's the one everyone

Landon: [00:31:04] But yeah, you were showing me, I mean, you get in there and it, it,

Kyle: [00:31:08] I mean,

Landon: [00:31:08] a lot.

Kyle: [00:31:08] it's one of those things, I'm sure if we spent a

Landon: [00:31:11] It's a lot for what we are

Kyle: [00:31:12] or, you know, we could also by like an off the shelf template or something, but, um, we'll see.

But yeah, I guess we'll, we'll let, we'll let everyone know how it goes in a future episode once. Maybe we'll, whenever we launched the website too. That'll be fun. So.

Landon: [00:31:24] Yeah, it's, yeah, I'm excited about that. Um, and all the stuff we're building and like the new stuff, we're going to be adding data or form.

So I don't think we have, we probably have no added reform customers that listen, but

Kyle: [00:31:35] If we do. Yeah.

Landon: [00:31:36] If we do, we've got some good stuff coming your way, so get excited. Um, anything else.

Kyle: [00:31:42] bit a bit meandering. Um, we'll keep at it. Try to, we'll try to get back on the weekly train

Landon: [00:31:48] And the topic train.

Kyle: [00:31:51] We, yeah, I kind of like both. I think it's good to mix them up, but. Um,

Landon: [00:31:55] Ever since. It's funny how this is all changed. We have every, we had a, not only did we, we do it every single week, like we, we've been doing the podcast every single week, but we also had a very specific topic where we could kind of meander around it, but like.

Here's the topic where we had notes and all this stuff, and then as soon as the baby came,

Kyle: [00:32:14] It's very ad hoc.

Landon: [00:32:15] we missed a couple weeks. It's ad hoc, but some people have reached out and said that they really

Kyle: [00:32:20] think. Yeah. I think it's nice. I think a mix, like I think we. We also queued up a few in the, before we started the show, like before we even started the podcast to to make sure we had like a good little runway.

So I think it's natural that it becomes a little less formal, um, as it's just like kind of our journey. So, Oh, speaking of which, uh, also you should check out pod hunt, um, which is like the product, like sort of product hunt for podcasts, like a leaderboard podcast, leaderboard, um, just released a makers podcast.

Kind of collection. I think the collection thing is a new feature on the pot hunt or will be a new feature. So there's a, there's one about maker's journeys and, and made with greatest featured, which is cool. So check that out. I think it's, I think it's maker makers. Dot putt hunt.co or something.

But yeah, we'll throw in the show notes. Um, so.

Landon: [00:33:11] Yeah. And one I want to start, I do want to get, having talked a little bit about the, getting back into the sales side of things. I would like to, um, as we start to, I mean, I'm, I'm definitely doing a lot more sales related activities now, which is kind of nice to get back into that a little bit.

I'm actually going to. By the way, if there's anybody listening and you're in New York and you want to like meet for coffee or something, I'm going to be in New York the 18th through the 21st

Kyle: [00:33:38] Of November. For F for listen listeners who are listening to this in 2020 we're talking about 2019 so.

Landon: [00:33:46] 2019. Um, so I'll be there, uh, trying to meet with, um, a bunch of our customers, um, on both products and obviously some, maybe potential customers, do some, some onsite meetings, get back into that flow a little bit and probably we'll make it up to New York at a lot more than I, uh, have been over the past year since we had our, our daughter.

Um, and my wife goes up to New York a lot, so we'll be going together and things like that. But, um, but yeah, starting to get back more into the like onsite meetings, demos truck, like taking people through trials and negotiating on contracts and, um, and all that good stuff. Uh, so maybe we'll talk more about like some of the things we're doing on the sales side.

I know there's some things that we're doing that, um, in my mind aren't like. Like revolutionary things. But probably some of the people that are listening have never been in sales, or you know, you're like engineers or whatever and you've never, you sold some things, but in a more indirect way and you haven't gotten into the, like the big kind of bigger deals and like how, what to expect from those and like how to, how to close those, how to respond to certain projections and comments and whatnot.

And so. Um, maybe we can walk through some of those things in the future. I think that'd be pretty

Kyle: [00:35:06] Yeah. Yeah. I think we have a nice hybrid of, a lot of our interests is inbound, but a lot of the deals become custom, so we end up with like. That sales process that you get once you're taking someone from lead to customer.

There's a lot. There's a lot of stuff in there.

Landon: [00:35:21] yeah, as, as things start to go over, like I would say like. Even 500 a month, but like especially like seven anything over like seven 50 a month, people start to get a little touchy about the pricing. Anybody would,

Kyle: [00:35:34] And they're looking for like discounts, bulk discounts, annual discounts,

Landon: [00:35:37] can you discount on?

What should you discount on? Like what

Kyle: [00:35:40] Or approvals, budget approvals.

Landon: [00:35:41] exactly, so we can start to dig into that stuff a little bit more. Especially as I remember all the little things that

Kyle: [00:35:48] Really, you can just read us your like notes from remembering stuff.

Landon: [00:35:51] Oh man, I wish I had, I wish I had all of the content that I had.

I mean, I had all of these like playbooks and like all kinds of stuff, and I'm like, I can't even remember half of that stuff

Kyle: [00:36:01] Yeah. Sort of related. I think it would be cool. Like I have, I have some notion pages that I plan on making templates, kind of some of, some of which we talk about here on the show.

So maybe on the sales side too, we could do like if there's anything useful like throat yeah, throw out there just for whoever it might be. Checking our show notes and wanting to get some resources.

Landon: [00:36:21] Yup. Yup. Cool. Well, we'll, we'll keep that in mind for later episode episodes and we can start to, to get that stuff in and I can start to wear my sales hat a little bit more.

Start dressing like, start wearing

Kyle: [00:36:35] suit to work

Landon: [00:36:35] Hey, have you noticed I've started starting to dress a little bit better to work again.

Kyle: [00:36:39] just for the record. Uh, jeans and a long sleeve tee shirt. That's what, that's what's happening

Landon: [00:36:45] Yeah. But for awhile there it was like, it was

Kyle: [00:36:47] Gym shorts.

Landon: [00:36:47] shorts every day

Kyle: [00:36:48] too cold for that.

Anyway.

Landon: [00:36:50] Yeah. So I'm getting back into that world, but anyways, uh, I think that's pretty good rundown. Um, and I'm excited to get back on the flow of this thing.

Kyle: [00:37:00] Yes. So hopefully we'll have weekly episodes and it is up as usual, um, in all the various Twitter accounts and check the show notes for anything we've talked about today, and we'll be back next week.

Landon: [00:37:13] See you next week.

Kyle: [00:37:14] See ya.